Accusative case

The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. It is a noun that is having something done to it, usually joined (such as in Latin) with the nominative case. The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. It is a noun that is having something done to it, usually joined (such as in Latin) with the nominative case. The English name 'accusative' comes from the Latin accusativus, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek αἰτιατική. This word may also mean 'causative', and this may have been the Greeks' intention in this name, but the sense of the Roman translation stuck and it is used in some other modern languages as the name of this case, for example in Russian (винительный). The accusative case is typical of early Indo-European languages and still exists in some of them (including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Polish, Russian), in the Finno-Ugric languages, and in Semitic languages (such as Arabic). Balto-Finnic languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, have two cases to mark objects, the accusative and the partitive case. In morphosyntactic alignment terms, both perform the accusative function, but the accusative object is telic, while the partitive is not. Modern English almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns; pronouns, however, have an oblique case as in whom, them, and her, which merges the accusative and dative functions, and originates in old Germanic dative forms (see Declension in English). In the sentence I see the car, the noun phrase the car is the direct object of the verb 'see'. In English, which has mostly lost the case system, the definite article and noun – 'the car' – remain in the same form regardless of the grammatical role played by the words. One can correctly use 'the car' as the subject of a sentence also: 'The car is parked here.' In a declined language, the morphology of the article or noun changes in some way according to the grammatical role played by the noun in a given sentence. For example, in German, one possible translation of 'the car' is der Wagen. This is the form in the nominative case, used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German – Ich sehe den Wagen. In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in the accusative case. The accusative case in Latin has minor differences from the accusative case in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Nouns in the accusative case (accusativus) can be used For the accusative endings, see Latin declensions. The accusative case is used for the direct object in a sentence. The masculine forms for German articles, e.g., 'the', 'a/an', 'my', etc., change in the accusative case: they always end in -en. The feminine, neutral and plural forms do not change.